Patricia Green Cellars Reserve Pinot Noir 2024

93 points Wine Enthusiast: "Go long on this elegant and balanced reserve wine, because it offers a lot of quality for a very reasonable asking price. The wine's first aroma wave features a potent bit of lilacs and hyacinth. When the floral show retreats, blackberries and an herb farm's worth of rosemary and oregano arrive. Flavors are similar to the wine's aromas, with blackberries, marjoram, thyme, lavender and Darjeeling tea holding court. The cherry on top here is a texture as smooth and slippery as Walton Goggins in a three-piece silk suit, sans shirt. Mercy."

Like Notorious, this is one of few Pinots in the massive lineup of PGC wines that is NOT a vineyard designate. But let's talk about what it IS: the winery's chance to show off the amazing quality of their Pinot Noir at an everyday price. The Reserve is as important to them as all of their fancier wines, and it shows—and what a spectacular showing in 2024, to boot! A beautiful vintage for the Reserve, with precision, power, and intensity.

The winery has always been dedicated to the concept of the highest level quality without necessarily attaching a corresponding price point. Patty and I always wanted to have a winery that made wines that we liked to drink, but more importantly a winery that had wines we would, were we the customer, feel good about paying for. The Reserve Pinot Noir is as important a bottling to us as the lowest production, super-fancy and exclusive wine that we make. Lots of people see, buy and drink the Reserve and that is something that we love.

Why is the entry-level wine called Reserve: Patricia Green Cellars has been around long enough that when we began our winery in 2000 there was still concern that the AVA “Willamette Valley” was not particularly well known around the country. Yes, those were different times. So, this bottling was actually labeled as “Oregon” from 2000- 2005. However, in 2002 we had 10 barrels from various vineyards that were very good, but not quite in line with what we were doing with the single vineyards the barrels came from, however we felt like they made a special wine above and beyond the Oregon bottling. We bottled them and called it “Reserve”. By 2006 it was clear that the Willamette Valley had made an indelible and lasting mark at a national and even international level and that it was time for us to ditch the Oregon moniker. However, the way our labels were set up back then we needed to have something in the stripe at the bottom of the label to identify the wine. To make this even more ponderous of a story, the issues in getting label approval back then were quite real as the ATF (at the time) did not have an online way to submit so approvals could take months. We decided to use the already approved “Reserve” label as we felt that this wine was more than some basic “Willamette Valley” bottling that had become a catchall for larger wineries cheapest Pinot Noir. And a decade and a half later it has all worked out. The wine is still an excellent quality Pinot Noir with vineyard sources that are quite astonishing given the wine’s place in our long lineup.